McColo take down proves ISPs have the power to stamp out spam

Now here's a fact to both amaze and annoy you. As we all suspected, the power to stop the tidal wave of spam rests squarely in the hands of ISPs, if they ever chose to act on it. The point is proven by the following graphic sent to Microsoft Subnet from anti-spam vendor MessageLabs (a company acquired by Symantec in October). Yesterday spam kingpin McColo Corp. was at least partially taken offline. McColo is a Web hosting service that has been credited with enabling 75 percent of the world's e-mail spam and scams. It had been watched by security experts for years but is one of a handful of hosting services that authorities thought was "bulletproof."

However, ISPs connect to each via "peering" agreements to exchange Internet traffic. On Tuesday night, Hurricane Electric, an ISP that carried a portion of McColo's traffic, disconnected with McColo. And the following 12 hours saw what a MessageLabs spokesperson describes as "a massive drop in spam volume to levels eight times less than typical volumes." (See graphic.) At the end of the 12 hours, spam levels began to rise agaiin. This experiment shows that if ISPs execute on their ability to cut off known spam offenders, they could take a big dent out of global spam, according to Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist, MessageLabs. Enterprises need to pressure their ISPs to do so. Unless a coordinated effort is put in place to continuously identify and cut off spam at the peering level, like a bad cat, it will always return.

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• Microsoft
• anti-spam
• ISPs
• McColo
• MessageLabs
• peering
• spam
• Symantec